Tomo Nakayama - Fog on the Lens LP (Limited Edition Northwest Fog Vinyl)

We're celebrating ten years of this beautiful album by repressing it on limited edition Northwest Fog vinyl! 

In the spring of 2014, Tomo was invited to a residency at Seattle’s Town Hall. Given free access to the 92 year old Roman-revival style building, Tomo decided to use it as his own recording studio. Tomo embraced the literal concept of “residency”, recording alone at odd hours of the night in the empty hall, with no restrictions on time, and the freedom to wander down whatever paths the songs led him. In essence and in spirit, "Fog On The Lens" is a bedroom album created in a cathedral-sized room: Tomo used the main performance hall to write and record on their Steinway grand piano. The backstage green room became an isolation booth for guitars. The long resonant hallway in the basement with its haunting reverb was used to track the vocals. All of this recording was done with one USB microphone plugged directly into a laptop. Additional work was done on the road, in a tiny cabin in Wallace Falls, Washington, and at a small bed and breakfast in Portland, Oregon, all with the same spirit of resourcefulness and creativity necessitated by the bare-bones set up.

When it came time to mix the sessions, Tomo enlisted the help of producer/multi-instrumentalist Yuuki Matthews (of The Shins and Teardrops). Though it was the first time the two had made music together, Yuuki displayed an immediate and intuitive understanding of Tomo’s vision. In addition to taking the unusual step of mixing the tracks Tomo recorded onto analog 4-track cassette tape, Yuuki overdubbed his own wildly imaginative array of analog synthesizers and homemade keyboard sounds which heightened the album’s evocative, dream-like atmosphere.

This beautiful album has been out of print for years, but we've brought it back (in limited quantities) to celebrate its tenth year.